It’s funny, how the memory cheats. How it smushes things together, how it can’t see two things in the same place. When we think of the moon landings we think of Kennedy even though Nixon was in the White House when Armstrong was on the moon. It’s hard to put the Kennedy assassination in the same year as The Beatles’ first album, or figure Laurel and Hardy were storming to power while Hitler was trying to get a piano up a flight of stairs. Somehow, as time passes, we condense and confuse these things, our timelines overlap and blur. My point here is when future historians and nostalgists look back at this site, they won’t even notice I was about a month and a half late talking about that stem cell burger they made a while back.

You’ll recall they made a stem cell burger a while back. It was funded by one of the guys from Google taking a break off reading your emails and spying on what you spaff to. He gave a few hundred grand to a couple of mad scientists taking a break off stitching hitchhikers’ mouths to hobos’ bumholes. They did a biopsy on a live cow, took a stem cell or two, whacked it in a Petri dish and grew 20,000 muscle fibres. They smushed them together into a sciency grey paste genetically identical to yer regular beef which, when mixed with a bit of beetroot juice, looked half like a raw burger if you squinted a bit. They did a live taste test on tv this week (Greetings, future nostalgists!) where no one puked and someone said it tasted sort of like meat in a way, kind of. It didn’t have much in the way of seasoning, wasn’t quite juicy enough and didn’t have the fat you get with regular meat grown on cows but the tasters reckoned it had potential.

This spot of present-day future space food raises four issues for us Zero types: what this means for the starving poor; what this means for the environment; what this means for vegetarians; and how soon I can eat it.

At first glance this doesn’t mean much to the starving poor given no one is less well equipped to buy a £200,000 burger than the poor, starving or otherwise. The dark lord of Google and his pals think different, suggesting the world will soon suffer its first Meat War as our lust for beef meets our massive armoury of horrible weapons. With the colossal population boom we’ve got coming and the unlikelihood of everyone taking to tofu they might be right, and the world could soon find itself with a few billion more starving poor. Mr Google, who knows all about your taste for Japanese schoolgirls and/or Ryan Gosling gifs, reckons his grey beetroot paste is the answer, providing meat to anyone who wants it without the need for massive grazing pastures, factory farms or food for livestock. Not everyone agrees with this, obviously, with critics suggesting this is just another chance for the rich West to knacker indigenous farming and livelihoods and wallop developing countries with our over-industrialised monster-food.

What this means for the environment is just as hard to figure. The billions of cows we breed for meat produce tons of methane which knackers the environment; doing away with their flatulence could save the planet. Similarly, it takes a ton of food to feed a cow so we can turn it into food, and all that takes land, energy, water and resources we could save if we were making it in Petri dishes. Environmentally this sounds like a winner but, as with the starving poor, there are downsides to be downsided. Mostly these fit into the What If category that says we shouldn’t dick around with nature, the kind of thing you hear when bigging up organic stuff and slagging off GM food. Given how nature likes to throw tsunamis and volcanoes our way it’s maybe best we tread carefully.

What this means for vegetarians is down to the individual, resting on how big an issue a live biopsy is for them and how they feel about eating meat even if it’s never really been alive to get killed. The Vegetarian Society isn’t much into it, saying it’s pointless going “to this much trouble and expense to replace a foodstuff that we simply do not need.” Its solution, you’ll be surprised to hear, is for us all to go vegetarian. PETA has been less clear on the issue, chaining four topless women to a lamp post in Surrey under a banner reading “Tits ahoy!” Still, vegetarians want to see a world where not a single animal is hurt or killed or mistreated for food. Whether we get there because the world suddenly goes mad for tempeh or because we get these stem cells figured will matter more to some than others.

All of which brings us to the most important issue: what this means for me. I would eat this burger. I would eat it with my mouth. I hate being vegetarian. I hate the inconvenience every time I leave the house. I hate the underwhelming blandness every time I eat some lousy meat replacement. I hate the effort it takes to learn to cook alternatives and I hate myself for never bothering. I literally cannot wait for these stem cell burgers to hit the market. And I do mean literally: tomorrow afternoon I will enter cryogenic stasis to emerge no earlier than spring 2048. It’s a drastic step, but not one that will in any way affect the regularity of my blog posts.

Skipping quietly over the big news of the week (she was an anti-feminist who never looked down after getting herself through the glass ceiling, a class warrior on the wrong side of the war and a homophobe whose homophobia brought in homophobic law) I suggest we turn our attention to a more pressing issue: me. As you’ll recall I’ve been terribly ill, mummy’s brave little soldier keeping his chin up through the flu, a chest infection, a spot of whooping cough and very little in the way of blogging. Throughout this charming episode I’ve had a number of very helpful people explain it’s all down to my vegetarianism, there having been no documented cases of illness among meat eaters. Indeed, it is said the fearsome plague of the Middle Ages was due almost entirely to the people of western Europe overindulging in houmous. Similarly, during one of the eight years I spent in a wheelchair I was indeed vegetarian, and there can be no denying that famous vegetarian Linda McCartney continues to be dead.

This kind of thing is one of the perks of vegetarianism. We’re never short on a bit of conversation from nosey people, we don’t go long without a bit of nutritional advice from people who know basically nothing about nutrition. People who combine telling you you’re not getting enough protein with not having any idea how much protein you should actually be getting. People who ask if you’re taking vitamins while cramming a Chicken McBastard in their mouths. Still, I will concede this recent bout of illness has coincided with an eight-year stretch of being a really crap vegetarian and an almost complete absence of the vitamins and foodstuffs I should actually be getting. And while I maintain it’s the crapness rather than the veggieness that’s the issue here, I need to do a bit of something.

You’ll recall my recent efforts to improve things on this front didn’t go particularly well. I’d promised to cook tofu like I’m not scared of its unfamiliar wibbley-wobbliness, combine proteins like I know what I’m talking about and boost B12 and omega 3 like I give a shit about either of them. I’ve not so much done all of that as not done any of it even slightly. I bought two big bottles of multi-vitamins and took some of them, and snacked on nuts and seeds for as long as it took for the packets of nuts and seeds to run out and be replaced by crisps and chocolate. They offer less in the way of protein but more in the way of wanting to live. I suspect I was aiming too high. I took on too much all at once. It was yer classic new year gym subscription. What I need is a gentle stroll at a mild incline on an undemanding treadmill no more than three feet from a Curly Wurly. With that in mind I’m limiting myself to tofu-based experimentation.

Fact is I like tofu, but only when cooked by other people. As is the case with all other foods. The few times I’ve tried to cook it I’ve mostly ballsed it up, like that time I threw it in stir fry and ended up with something that looked like grey scrambled eggs run over by a shopping trolley and had the same powdery aftertaste you get when you kiss your granny’s forehead. I don’t quite understand when I should be using silken tofu (the slippery/sloppery white stuff) or firm tofu (the spongy/squishy beige stuff) or how a big block of rubbery gloop can come from a bean. You look at a bean, you look at tofu, you’d never put the two together. And as much as I wish I could cook the stuff, I mostly can’t be bothered thinking about considering the possibility of approaching the notion of pondering actually doing something about it.

But that has to change. I’ve acquired a tofu cookbook, one devoted entirely to the beige beany mush to the exclusion of all other foods. Except the food you mix with it when cooking, obviously. Otherwise it’d just be a book of different ways of putting tofu on a plate and even I don’t need a book for that. Actually, I just tried it and it ended up sideways in a toast rack and now my house is on fire. I need this book. It’s got yer classic ‘70s brown recipes and a bunch of half-interesting curries, stir fries and desserts. Plan is to tackle this stuff once a week ‘til I know what I’m doing, and fight the urge to post pictures to the Zero Twitter feed like some tedious Instagram foodie bastard.

Naturally I don’t think this will make even the tiniest bit of difference to my lousy immune system but it’ll give me better grounds for being smug when the finger-wagging meat eaters visit me in my sickbed/dialysis/the morgue to say they told me so. How I hate them.

And so, with 2012 behind us and the Mayans looking like some sort of primitive culture that didn’t have everything figured out and their modern-day followers looking like some sort of bucketload of twats, one’s attention naturally turns to one’s achievements across the year and to the resolutions rushed out in the interests of filling a page.

And then there was the small matter of my new year’s resolutions, a cluster of low-rent ambitions so hastily cobbled together and even more hastily forgotten about that this paragraph’s about to get very embarrassing. First, I vowed to become a better vegetarian, something I achieved on a rather half-assed level. My left bum cheek bought some multi-vitamins to plug the gaps in my otherwise lousy diet, started snacking on nuts and seeds to actually get some protein down my neck, and cooked one or two meals using actual ingredients rather than just slinging some ready-made, mutant-looking, meat-free sludge in the oven. It’s been an okay start, the bonus being I can use the same resolution again this year. Second, I aimed to give more to charity, looking to reach about ten percent of my take-home pay once I’d battered through my colossal student debt. I’ve made similar progress there, my right bum cheek bumping up my donations to about six percent which isn’t bad considering the remaining colossalness of my colossal student debt. Third, I promised to buy the most environmentally friendly car I could manage once my old car died completely. It did, obviously, and I did an okay job of getting a half-decent replacement. I couldn’t afford anything in the way of an electric or hybrid car but I got a diesel with lower emissions that’s so far saved a couple thousand kilograms of carbon dioxide being spewed into Al Gore’s sensitive lungs. That’s a solid bit of resolutioning, that is. And fourth, I vowed to switch to an electricity supplier trading only in renewable energy. That hasn’t happened, what with the forgetting all about it and then the remembering about it but realising I couldn’t afford it yet. I’m all for paying a bit more to save the world but it’s had to be bumped to the post-debt era in what even my most loyal supporters are calling a humiliating failure of Lib Dem proportions. Still, that new set of resolutions are writing themselves, aren’t they?

So for 2013 we’ll start with the better vegetarian thing, actually learning what’s to be done with the likes of tofu, lentils, vegetables and my kitchen and turning them into edible meals. Add to that a working knowledge of yer basic nutrition and a hefty increase in protein and smugness and that’ll be me sorted. Next, the electricity thing. What with us having to be the change we wish to see in the world I’ll sign up for a more expensive but beautifully clean supplier that uses only wind, water, sunshine or human spinal fluid to power the many spy cameras I have placed around Al Gore’s bedroom. Third, the charity thing. I need to restart regular donations to the likes of Care International and WaterAid on my way to the ten percent target, showing how atheism rolls with the tithing. And fourth, I’ll aim to do my job well. That shouldn’t take a resolution but it’s easy to get worn down quickly in social work, easy to turn to them-and-us thinking, easy to drift to the right. It’s easy to forget people are products of their environments, easy to get frustrated with their inability to change, easier to blame people than the environments that made them and the systems that keep them in place. I’ll aim to keep my lefty principles intact, keep up with research to make sure what I’m doing works, and be as awesome as it’s possible to be.

I will do this. I will do all of this. In November, when I remember I wrote this whole bastard of a thing.

Having signed up for a life as a Zero I am duty bound to do good, to right wrongs both large and small, to meddle in events both global and local, and to take credit for any good thing that happens within a four mile radius of me and anywhere else in the world and also throughout history. But even with my in-built awesomeness, even with my devotion to the cause, even with my principal principles well in place, these things can drift. People, it’s time for a do-gooding audit!

I’m doing okay with Fairtrade, having substituted a decent amount of evil-hearted products with their noble Fairtrade equivalents. I’m strict on tea, coffee, sugar, bananas, cereal bars and cocoa powder, a bit patchy with the likes of jam, marmalade, spices and non-banana based fruitage, and lousy with the likes of cereal and clothes. My excuse here is around availability but, if we’re honest, I could track them down with a little effort. There’s work to be done there. Laziness aside, chocolate remains my weak point, both with Fairtrade and with life in general. I crave the lusty brown beast like my grandmother craves cock, and without personal intervention from Nancy Reagan I’m powerless against its charms. I buy Fairtrade chocolate whenever it’s around, made easier by the likes of Dairy Milk and Maltesers, and go for Rainforest Alliance as a back up but if the need’s upon me and I’m facing an only partially-stocked vending machine I’ll go for whatever they’ve got and say balls to Africa and hide in a corner and cram the dirty brown glory block into my face hole. On Fairtrade, then, I’m mostly worse than Hitler.

The Nestlé boycott’s my strong point, my moral Achilles’ rest of body. You’ll recall how Nestlé aggressively markets baby milk formula in countries where the dirty water it gets mixed with can kill and where the price can knacker the world’s poorest people and how it does this in spite of breast milk coming free and breasts being fitted as standard on the bodies of roughly half the adult population of the planet. I’ve not bought anything from them sons of bitches in about six years, not counting the ton of chocolate I bought in the name a particularly immature burn. Even when faced with the vending machine dilemma I steer clear of Nestlé, even though my life is emptier for the absence of Drifters and their chewy goodness, Milky Bars and their creepy child mascots and Yorkies and their tedious gender stereotyped marketing campaigns. Yes yes, full points for me there.

Likewise, I continue to be awesome in the category of vegetarianism, at least in terms of not eating animals. I remain fairly lousy in terms of basic nutrition. Fact is, try as I might, I just can’t give two shits about it. For that I’ll score myself two Linda McCartneys, minus one Heather Mills, resulting in a final score of a PETA volunteer’s exposed vagina.

As for volunteering, I’m a little conflicted. Fundraising for Yaknak, I’ve done a half marathon and a cross country 10k in the past couple of months and bigged up regular donations that now account for more than half its income. It would, of course, be unwise to make direct comparisons with Christ. We all know how that went for John Lennon – who I am also like. However, good as I am there’s something slightly unsatisfying about it all, being as how most of the work is done online, tucked away in Zero Towers rather than out in the world. I felt much more hands on and do-goodery when I was doing those river clean ups but it’s amazing how quickly you get tired of picking up other people’s junk and condoms. Here, I feel, I need to do something new.

Environmentally I’m about middle on the Al Gore/Fox News spectrum. I’ve abandoned public transport for work in favour of some actual reliability and convenience, a sell out so huge John Lydon interrupted the filming of his latest butter advert to give me a telling off. Similarly, I haven’t got around to changing my electricity supply to more expensive renewable energy thanks to colossal student debt, and have dabbled with old, evil washing up liquid after the plant-based stuff proved insufficient for the greasy shit I’ve been cooking. I’ve also got a bit slack around reusable shopping bags, often forgetting to take them with me and having to buy new ones which probably makes them less environmentally friendly than the thinner disposable ones. Worse than all of this, I’ve reverted to old incandescent light bulbs in some of the windowless rooms in Zero Towers, the gloom in winter descending to somewhere around the middle ages. In the plus column, I still recycle like a mutha, still refuse plastic cups at the water cooler, still buy second hand, still compost, still go for sustainable materials when buying stuff, and still avoid veg flown from Uganda when there’s local stuff on offer. I’d say I’ve got a bit of work to do if Al Gore is ever to make me his bride.

So there we are. A spot of awesomeness with a degree of slippage. I need to get more fundamentalist on Fairtrade chocolate, walk with a cocky swagger on behalf of the Nestlé boycott, try and be a slightly better vegetarian to the extent that I give a shit, really pull up my hemp socks on the environment and either do some hands-on volunteering or feel smugger about the stuff I’m doing already. None of which brings us to September’s Charity of the Month. It’s me. Please give generously.

In the days before my epic post-qualifying/pre-job slouchfest, back when I was an overworked and increasingly tetchy student, I bashed out a few new year’s resolutions to fill up a bit of space on what was becoming a seriously neglected blog. However, comeuppances being what they are, I’m now forced to put some effort into doing whatever it was I said I’d do, and all to satisfy an audience of precisely no one. How I hate myself.

Among my resolutions, if memory or edit/find serves, was to be a better vegetarian, to give more to charity when I’m back on salary, to buy a less polluting car and to arrange a renewable energy supplier to power the various death rays housed in my mountain fortress. Given that I’m still fairly moneyless we’ll start with the being a better vegetarian thing.

Now, while PETA naturally assumed the new year would see me baring my genitals more often, being a better vegetarian is actually about covering the basics I’ve been neglecting. I’m no good with the nutrition side of things, blanking protein like an old school friend in a supermarket. I can’t remember which of the vitamins I’m supposed to be making effort to find, or what the deal is with omega 3 or leafy greens or basically anything except the part about not eating dead things.

It’s time to go over the basics of veggie nutrition and fill in the gaps. The first one is protein. According to my earlier plagiarism of the Vegetarian Society I should be getting about 55g a day. That’s about what you’d find in 300g of minced beef or 250g of some fish or other, although to do so you’d have to be an inhumane accessory to cow murder after the fact, content to let our bovine cousins suffer horribly prior to their excruciating death. Or a pescatarian. I’m getting nowhere near that amount of protein, settling for whatever I can eke out of fake-ass non-sausages. I need to stock up on tofu and learn how to do stuff with it, buy nuts and seeds and remember to actually eat them, throw in a spot of dairy for variety, and figure out what to do with beans, lentils and legumes. Then there’s the thing about protein combining that I never understood and chose to ignore. It’s tempting to continue ignoring it, all the talk of lysine and methionine about as interesting as your average Twitter feed.

Protein aside there’s the issue of vitamins, and specifically vitamin B12. While the first eleven can go fuck themselves, B12 is apparently where it’s at. If we average the figures given by the Vegetarian Society and the Vegan Society we need between 1.5 and 3 micrograms a day, a microgram being one millionth of a gram. At which point I lose interest again. But while the micro-unit implies a monumental lack of importance, the Vegetarian Society says it’s vital for the growth and development of babies, the Vegan Society says B12 deficiency can lead to anaemia or nervous system damage, and PETA says something about tits. Through a megaphone, while splashing red paint around the premiere of a film you’ve never heard of. Point is, we have to take it seriously. I need a few specific foodstuffs – yer fortified breakfast cereals, yer eggs, yer cows’ milk, yer non-branded yeast extract spread.

Then there’s the omega 3 thing, which the Vegetarian Society says is found in stuff like flaxseed, hempseed, rapeseed and walnuts. Not counting those three walnuts I had at Christmas, my intake of those particular items is generally below par. Downing a tablespoon of flaxseed oil every morning is about as appealing as downing a tablespoon of flaxseed oil every morning. I don’t feel I need a metaphor for that. Fortunately, peanut butter has diversified its portfolio to include the likes of sunflower seed butter and pumpkin seed butter, which might be decent alternatives.

The trick is to turn all this into something tangible and edible, easy to slap together and just tasty enough to prevent reactive vomiting. I’ve been lazy, friends. I’ve been vegetarian for seven years and I’m still not entirely sure what tempah is. Or how to say it. Or what it does, and where its loyalties lie. This has to change. Immediately. Or if not immediately, then late on the evening of December 31st.

And so to 2012. As we embark on the final year of our civilisation’s time on the earth, with hopes of hoverboards and Skynets and robot mistresses fading, with Mayans falling from the sky and three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse dressed and ready, I have cause to reflect on all that we achieved together last year. If I recall correctly, I did some minor bits of very little and you didn’t bother reading about them.

We started our social work placements, righting wrongs on emergency duty shifts and de-offending young offenders. We took the Zero manifesto to the next generation, taking up residence in the uni magazine to bang on about vegetarianism, ethical tourism, volunteering and full on proper meddling. We took to the streets for the National Spring Clean, picking up litter, junk and a touch of Hepatitis. We reached out to artists and photographers to fill the site with images and steal nothing from no one. We campaigned for the AV referendum, succeeding brilliantly and transforming our electoral system forever if memory serves. We gave to a ton of Chazzas of the Month and reloaned our Kiva cash to entrepreneurs in Sierra Leone, Kenya and Rwanda. We completely failed to buy an environmentally friendly car, ran a couple of 10ks for chazza and bought vegetarian running shoes in the interests of thoroughness. We went to Nepal, gave to a hard up school, bigged up Fairtrade and fought the class war in Kathmandu. We signed a bunch of e-petitions that didn’t go anywhere because they weren’t sufficiently crass or racist. We freecycled til we couldn’t freecycle no more, we watched and told others to watch The Cove, and we did nothing while they killed Troy Davis. We bigged up the Nestlé boycott, joined a union to score a day off and converted the office to environmentalism in preparation for the return of Gore. And then we sort of ballsed it all up for a few weeks at the end there in a shameful display of inactivity as deadlines and late nights kicked us rather spectacularly in the arse.

But now we begin again, refreshed and ready, socks pulled up, new leaves purchased and turned over. And although our days are numbered, enough remain with which to do good. This will be the year we qualify as a social worker and get to meddle professionally, without essays jamming up our out of hours do-gooding time, with salary to do more good in the direction of charity. Opportunity awaits and resolutions are to be resolted. Or resoluted, depending on how far you’re willing to taunt the English language.

Last year we resolved to run a 10k for chazza (done), buy the world’s most ethical toothbrush (done) and launch Operation Parmesan (done, just barely, like Indy sliding under a door of rock and just about grabbing his hat). They were a mix of the clichéd, the tedious and the who gives a shit but they got done. This year I propose the following mix of the groundbreaking, the earth shattering and the game changing: First, I’ll be a better vegetarian, going after better sources of protein and vitamins and cooking halfway decent stuff instead of just heating up guff made by the ghost of Linda Macartney. Second, I’ll give more to charity, building up to about ten percent of my take-home once the worst of my student debts are covered and assuming Mrs Zero’s still around for me to sponge off. Third, I will actually succeed in buying the most environmentally friendly car my budget can manage when this current model dies as it inevitably will before the year is out. And fourth, I will look to switch my energy supplier to one that deals exclusively in wind, water, heart and various other Planeteers.

I will do these things. I will do all these things and more. And if I don’t, may God strike me dead where I stand. Or put shaving foam in my hand when I’m asleep on his couch and then tickle my nose.

As the days count down and 2011 draws to a close I have some unfinished business to attend to, an outstanding resolution yet to be instood. I speak, of course, of Operation Parmesan, the unprecedented assault on the world of cuisine that will make the Hiroshima bombing look like an inappropriate historical event to make reference to.

As established vegetarians will know, the world of fine dining is fraught with danger, uncertainty and untold risk. People throw ham into lentil soup, fish stock into veggie risotto, whey powder into anything they fancy. Cheese presents a particular danger, so much of it vegetarian, so much of it not, and its identical appearance giving no clues as to which is which. It’s like those 17 episodes of Star Trek with two identical Kirks where you’re unsure which to shoot because they’re both telling you the other one’s the shape shifting bad guy. Parmesan is the king of this stuff, baiting the vegetarian like no other cheese dares.

Parmesan with a big P and a Sunday name of Parmigiano Reggiano is one of those EU protected origin foods that keeps Jeremy Clarkson awake at night. It’s always put together in the same way. It always uses rennet ripped from the stomach of an unsuspecting cow to separate its curds from its whey, making it about as vegetarian as foie gras on a bed of Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall. And still restaurants, cafes, bistros, catering vans and miscellaneous eateries continue to offer so-called vegetarian dishes covered with the beefy cheese stuff. This is the kind of shit up with which we will not put.

Operation Parmesan will select key targets in the battle to return rennet to cows’ stomachs and make eating veggie food slightly less inconvenient. It will pinpoint key sites in the struggle for more accurate menu descriptions, dropping bombs of truth on the Dresdens of eateries. It will, basically, send letters to restaurants telling them to knock it off. You’re free to join in through the use of the copy and paste function of your personal computer:

I dined recently in your eating establishment, and while I enjoyed the evening (in spite of the people I was with) I was dismayed/disheartened/mightily pissed off [delete according to hyperbole preference] to find your menu included Parmesan in its vegetarian dishes. Let’s be clear here: Parmesan is not vegetarian. Parmesan (Parmesano Reggiano) uses rennet, an enzyme taken from cows’ stomachs. It’s not even slightly vegetarian, carrying with it the foul stench of bovine death.

But fear not, there are options available to you. You could very easily buy some vegetarian imitation parmesan (small P) which would thrill and delight your vegetarian customers and encourage me to make a return visit to your otherwise pleasant eatery. There’s Parmazano or Bookham’s veggie parmesan or others to choose from and they all taste more or less like the cowed up stuff you currently serve. Get on it!

Yours rennetly,

The Zero.

—

And so it begins. If we can change just one restaurant’s use of Parmesan, if we can educate just one vegetarian who doesn’t know any better, if we can save just one cow’s stomach then frankly this whole thing will have been a colossal waste of time. Seriously, if we only change one person we’ll have failed not just with this campaign but with life in general. There’s yer pep talk, now get on it!

It’s a hard and trying task, all this Zero business. All this research, all this protesting, all this motivating the troops and doing the groupies. At times I grow weary. People cannot live on self-righteousness alone. It can’t be all hard work and hand wringing and so from time to time I put down my tools, tramp down from the moral high ground to the sewer in which the rest of you live, and have a night off. A couple of nights ago I watched a film. Naturally, I was able to turn it pretty quickly into hard work and handwringing.

It was The Cove, the winner of the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary. It looks at how thousands of dolphins are slaughtered by arseholes in Japan and how a few slightly less unlucky ones are shipped off to aquariums around the world for a life in captivity, performing tricks for food like they’re in a freak show and carting people round on their backs because swimming with dolphins is on every unoriginal mope’s bucket list. It was quietly horrific.

Ric O’Barry is at the centre of the film and the effort to show the world how wrong it’s going. He was the guy who caught and trained dolphins for the Flipper TV show then had an epiphany about how badly they were treated, how tortured and depressed they were, how intelligent, how empathetic, how creative they are. Turns out Flipper wasn’t just an innocent Sunday afternoon pile of dreck. It helped kick off an industry of torture and cruelty. As revelations go its about as depressing as when Skippy was found turning tricks in Reno, giving up her pouch to anyone with a handful of acorns and a line of speed.

The filmmakers recruited freedivers, Industrial Light and Magic and other experts to sneak into the cove where dolphins are trapped and killed, risking a kicking and jail time amid intimidation and general twattishness. The footage they get is quite amazing. I don’t want to undo its shock value by telling you about it. The sea turns red, let’s leave it at that.

So Ric reckons if you’re not an activist you’re an inactivist, and the end credits tell us to tell other people about it so here I am doing some of that. After you’ve seen the thing you should visit the official site and the Take Part thing and sign one of them there petitions that might make its way to the International Whaling Commission via the White House seeing as how no one in Japan is doing much about it. And you should spam the bejesus out of Facebook, slapping the trailer on your wall and joining the 1,134,289 people who’ve signed the petition there. All of which might amount to you whispering into a bucket in a locked cupboard in an empty house in a town full of mutes near an exploding foghorn factory but which also might do some good eventually at some point if it reaches enough people and they do the same.

So there’s The Cove for you. I also watched Weekend at Bernie’s which has some salient points on the issue of man’s inhumanity to man but maybe we’ll cover that another time.

You’ll recall how I’ve been writing for my uni’s studentmag. It’s some full on proper do-gooding, converting everyone on campus to my splendid way of life and raising issues usually neglected by right-on students such as Fairtrade, vegetarianism, feminism, environmentalism… Oh. Right.

Anyway, the new issue’s theme is love and hate. For those of you whose subscription to the magazine has lapsed, here’s my bit complete with soon to be edited off-colour gags:

This being the love and hate issue, and this also being the do-gooding bit of the mag, I’m looking at something that enflames the emotions of both extremes: vegetarianism. Vegetarians are both loved (by themselves) and hated (by everyone else). I say this as a proud and practising vegetarian myself. Believe me when I say the extreme lifestyle choice on which I have embarked is a constant source of moral contentment, slight embarrassment and massive inconvenience.

On the love side, I love knowing I’m not doing harm to animals. No lambs are being chopped, no cows are being steaked, no chickens are being chickened for me and my dinner. No animals are being raised in painfully cramped conditions for my sake, no animals are being electrocuted and killed from me wanting it, no animals are being skinned for my clothes. I am loving that more than just a bit.

Also on the love side, I love living according to my principles. For years I thought it was cruel to hurt and kill animals for food in the way I thought it was cruel to hunt and kill animals for sport or to torture and kill animals for giving the RSPCA something to do. I thought it was cruel but I kept on eating animals because they were full on proper tasty. Now I don’t, and it feels good to be good about it.

But then there’s the hate side of things, and with vegetarianism it’s not insignificant. First, I hate being associated with militant types who think the ‘Meat is Murder’ T-shirt never went out of fashion, who accuse meat eaters of being hypocrites or worse than Hitler, who sharpen tofu into spears and go about the place stabbing anyone within a three-mile radius of KFC. I’m not up for that at all. I’d like more vegetarians in the world and less cruelty to animals but I’m not looking to get judgmental and self-righteous about it. If you want to eat meat, like I did for the first 25 years of my life, then shine on.

Second, I hate having to put up with PETA. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are like that gobby kid in school who wanted attention and didn’t care if he was getting it from a decent grade or from kicking another kid in the chin; as long as people were looking at him he was chuffed. So while they do cracking undercover investigations on life in the slaughterhouse they also indulge in publicity stunts that make them an easy target for anyone looking to make fun of vegetarianism. More worryingly, they tend to neglect the basics of feminism, having largely female supporters get their kit off and showing an annual ‘State of the Union Undress’ where a female supporter strips while running over their successes from the previous 12 months. It’s a baffling campaign to convert Page 3 fans to vegetarianism while leaving women objectified and feminists of both genders furious.

Lastly, I hate the inconvenience of vegetarianism. When you go out the world is your oyster; when I go out the world is my tomato-based pasta dish. Most restaurants show no interest in the millions of vegetarians we have knocking about the country and tend to offer only a veggie burger, veggie lasagne or something with tomatoes, and stuffed mushrooms appears to be the world’s only legal vegetarian starter. Then there’s the problem of explaining how Parmesan cheese isn’t vegetarian (it’s got rennet from a cow’s stomach in it), how alcohol isn’t always vegetarian (it’s sometimes got isinglass from a fish’s swim bladder in it) or how ice cream isn’t always vegetarian (I can’t even be bothered explaining that one). It’s a massive faff best avoided, which is why I now only leave the house when it’s on fire. I just stay in and cook my own animal-friendly food which, happily, brings us back to the love side of things.

I love the taste of tofu, soya milk, lentils, chick peas, Quorn and everything cooked up by the ghost of Linda McCartney. Actually that’s not entirely true. I hate it. I hate it all. Six years into this vegetarianism lark I still dream about bacon and wake up crying. But there we are. Love it or hate it, this is the life I chose.

For more on vegetarianism and animal rights, visit The Vegetarian Society. For more on meat and animal wrongs, visit your local butcher.

As is the case with seemingly everything I do nowadays, my new year’s resolutions received mixed reviews and a couple of death threats, with The New York Times calling them “lazy, uninspired and self-regarding”, the Daily Mail calling them “a bunch of Commies that threaten the traditional family” and Heating and Ventilation News complaining they had “little or nothing to do with either heating or ventilation.”

But criticism doesn’t sting me; instead it inspires me to act, much as Kevin Costner’s movie reviews must do to him. Except they don’t inspire him to act so much as to read out loud and remember not to look at the camera, but you get my point. My point being he’s not a very good actor.

One of my resolutions was to buy a new toothbrush and, on the surface, it seems like a fairly easy thing to tick off my list. Maybe it is if all you do is think of an item you need, go into a shop and buy it and then bring it home and use it. But my life isn’t that simple, my social conscience being the size of six double-decker football pitches and my life being ruined by a sense of duty that borders on a personality disorder. I lie awake at night thinking about the harm my toothbrush is doing to the world, its oil-spawned plastic bringing us ever closer to drowning in the Gore Apocalypse. It cannot go on, and so I find myself in search of the world’s most ethical alternative toothbrush. My options are as varied as they are dull to read about.

The most sustainable choice is probably the wooden toothbrush with pig bristles. There’s no plastic there at all, just degradable and recyclable materials. Much as I like its Flintstonian qualities it does undo the vegetarianism somewhat; it’s fairly pointless choking down hemp, tofu and glossop if I’m flossing my teeth with a lemur’s hamstring. I think on the whole I’d rather use plastic than animal parts.

That brings us to the Preserve toothbrush made from recycled yogurt pots. Although its bristles are made from new plastic, the whole thing can be recycled after use which means there’s almost no waste. They’re made in America so getting them here and back must take a hefty chunk of carbon, but its manufacturer buys carbon credits as a get-out-of-Gore card. It’s not ideal but it’s a contender.

Then we have the Monte Bianco toothbrush with replaceable heads. It would mean I could use the handle for the rest of my life and buy just a few heads a year, reducing my toothbrush waste by about 80%. That’s quite impressive but they’re made from first use plastic and the heads aren’t recyclable, and sending anything to landfill these days feels about as good as punching a seal pup in the tits. This is a good idea not quite there yet.

Right. Enough deliberating. A decision is needed; I’ve been writing this entry for sixteen hours now. I’m going to go for the yogurt pots. None of the options are perfect and none will improve my sleep significantly or stop me flagellating myself with the Stick of Shame but it’s about the most forward-thinking toothbrush out there. If it gets itself a factory in the UK it’ll be damn near perfect.